SAN FRANCISCO / Drive to keep kids in school / City opens campaign to cut truancy by thousands of students

Antonio Ayala, a 14-year-old freshman at San Francisco's Gateway High, struggled on Monday to stretch his arms wide enough to hold up a huge poster of himself above the words, "Education = Possibility."

He said he might hang the poster, given to him by Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, in his bedroom at his family's Mission District home. Copies of the poster also will be traveling the city for the rest of the school year slapped to the side of Muni buses -- an effort to encourage Ayala's truant peers to attend school.

"It'll be kind of weird," admitted Ayala of his newfound fame. "But I'll feel happy knowing I'm trying to change other kids' minds about school."

Ayala and six other high school students serve as models for a new public information campaign designed to curb the district's longtime truancy problem. Large portraits of the students, along with phrases including "Education = Freedom" and "Education = Independence," will decorate buses, bus shelters and schools around the city and will be shown before movies at several local theaters.

The campaign is part of a response to a report last year by the San Francisco civil grand jury, which criticized the district for its lax attitude toward keeping students in class, a problem that costs the schools up to $10 million a year in state funding for per-pupil daily attendance. The report found that of the city's 18,000 high school students, 5,000 regularly miss at least one day of school each week and another 5,000 constantly arrive late.

Ackerman, Mayor Gavin Newsom, District Attorney Kamala Harris, Police Chief Heather Fong, Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Bevan Dufty, and Board of Education members Eddie Chin, Heather Hiles and Dan Kelly converged on John O'Connell High in the Mission on Monday to announce the new campaign and pledge citywide support in getting children back in school.

"Nothing is more frustrating than going in the middle of the week to Sunnydale, the Western Addition, Potrero ... and seeing young men and women hanging out on the street corner," Newsom said. "You scratch your head and say, "Well, where are their parents? Where are the schools? And where is the community?' "

The public information campaign -- funded with $40,000 from the city, $40,000 from Wells Fargo and donations from Muni and other groups -- is just a slice of a meaty initiative, Ackerman said.

The Stay in School Coalition -- composed of 42 members from various agencies and community groups -- has been meeting for more than a year to find ways of raising daily attendance at every school to at least 96 percent.

With the group's help, the district is piloting two programs at O'Connell and Thurgood Marshall High in which groups of 25 to 35 truant ninth- and 10th- graders take classes together and get intensive instructional counseling to get them back on the path toward graduation.

The district has also placed nine "attendance liaisons" at schools with the biggest truancy problems. One of them, Jaime Osorno, works at O'Connell and has targeted 100 truant students.

"There are many reasons they don't go to school -- my job is to figure out why," he said. He uses a computer system to monitor attendance, meets with parents of truant students and tries to find some appealing part of school for each student to draw them back.

In a time when extracurricular activities and arts, music and other so- called extras are being chopped due to a lack of funding, that can be especially difficult, he said.

O'Connell offers career-based programs in which students take vocational classes in addition to their academic load and get on-the-job experience through internships.

Elizabeth Quandt, 15, an aspiring chef, stopped going to class when the school's culinary program was cut. She wants to cook aboard a cruise ship so she can travel the world and then open her own restaurant.

Osorno is convinced that a high school diploma will help her career and found some cooking classes at City College she may qualify for -- and now she's back in school.

Her friend Vanessa Mendez, 15, said she stopped showing up at school because of family problems. The Discovery Channel fan has always wanted to have a career in forensics and eventually realized that's not likely without a high school diploma.

"I'm coming every day and trying my best to get here on time," she said. "I'll make it through high school and then go to college. ... It feels better now."